Love's Bonfire is Tom Paulin's first collection since 2004's The Road to Inver, which assembled his translations. The arrival of the new book explains the sense that something has been missing in the meantime – Paulin's restless and idiosyncratic worrying at the points of friction between poetry, politics and history. As "A Noticed Thing" comments, while time has elapsed and there has been a peace settlement in Northern Ireland, "the world though is not conclusion".

Paulin's approach, which has been developing over the 30-odd years since his pivotal third collection, Liberty Tree, is hard to describe, and is meant to be so. Although he has at times written work of considerable scale, he seems to have decided against either a monumental approach or the set-piece history poems undertaken by exemplars such as Robert Lowell and Douglas Dunn that might once have been predicted for the author of "The Strange Museum" and "Desertmartin". His poems attempt to sustain a position neither outside nor wholly consumed by events, with a language and form where speech is always at the forefront. Yet he also seeks an authority equivalent to those established by kinds of formality and rhetoric he has sought to evade. It's a hard road.

By trying to stay close to the point of perception the poems issue challenges to both reader and writer – most obviously how to make something of consequence from what might prove merely diaristic. As though to satirise the predicament, in "A Noticed Thing" Paulin makes an inanimate object, an orange windsock on an airfield, address him in a recognisably Paulinesque voice: "I was your image at one time / for the whole world / for everything-that-is-the-case / plus the wind rushing through it / or gulshing through it if you like /but perhaps you've moved on?" The Troubles in Northern Ireland, on which Paulin spent such imaginative energy, are, at any rate officially, over: so where does this leave the advocate of democratic enlightenment? Satisfied? At rest? It would seem not.

Where once there were inflexible allegiances and enmities, now there can seem to be a wilderness of mirrors in which from certain angles perfidious Albion looks, strangely and momentarily, honour-bright. In Ireland, Paulin reports with dry black deadpan humour, "Old enemies can break bread together / and shout and laugh at each other / but part the best of new friends. / This never works at an English suppertable / maybe because the English / are rather more honest / – with them what you see is what you get / – it's that plain and simple". How many fingers can you see? At times it seems that Paulin feels he has lost his way, his place in the unfolding text, or his vantage point in history.

The most powerful expression of doubt, though, comes in a love poem. In the title poem of Love's Bonfire he observes himself "Forty years on / in a deep dark time / with a permanent pain always in my head" and thinks back to an evening walk with the young Indian woman who married him despite anxieties that her family might expect her to accept a traditional arranged marriage. Paulin casts himself as a timid figure faced with this prospective conflict. He recalls her stirring a bonfire to life with a stick, and imagines that if he reminded her of the occasion "you'd only say / veteris vestigia flammae / – though I pray that you wouldn't". The Latin – "the ashes of an ancient flame" – is spoken by the widowed Queen Dido in Virgil's Aeneid, when she is woken once more to love, only to suffer Aeneas's desertion; the phrase also occurs in Thomas Hardy's poems of 1912-13, in which he mourns his wronged wife. Hardy is really Paulin's starting point as a poet, and the subject of his first critical book, and art and life converge to poignant effect here. One of the several questions the poem implies is whether, like many another, he has come to feel that he has staked too much on art, at life's expense.

The translations from the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar placed at the centre of the book might be a way of answering such self-suspicion, by placing one man's art at the service of another's in the context of a pressing historical and political crisis. These are conspicuously more confident performances than most of the other poems: indeed Paulin sounds more like himself here, finding evident affinities with Khazendar's blend of alienation and resistance. In "The Pinched Stream", "you hear rain that isn't there / hitting windows that aren't there / and before you even make a move / you can hear the noise your footsteps'll make / – it's as though fruit can choose / not to settle on the earth". The bare, impoverished landscape that emerges in Khazendar's poems is like one that Paulin already knows imaginatively, while the refusal to separate history and politics from the personal life has always been his subject. "Belongings" asks: 'Who entered my room while I was out / and moved the vase on the mantelpiece just a tad? / who skewed that print – a Crusader – on the far wall? / and those pages loose on my desk / they're a shade dishevelled aren't they?" Love's Bonfire is a welcome, if sombre, return from a fine poet.